i'm going back to cali, cali, cali

Post-wine brain making it hard to stay awake today. Also I think air-conditioning is killing me. I'm very, very, very excited that it is my last day of New York law firm life. I am so woozy. I just got passport photos and I have perfected the art of the downward-turning smile. I can't keep my eyes open! Who should I sue if air-conditioning kills me?

rube's cube

I'm two blocks away from solving a Rubik's Cube. It's just a bunch of algorithms that someone else figured out and that I apply on autopilot. For example: DLdldfDF solves the middle faces. THIS IS WHAT I'M DOING WITH MY LIFE.

so so shy does 4 non blondes

Just a sample of our show - I'm really distracted by fondness now.



I'm leaving whenceforth I came in four days, for the rest of the summer. I'm sure my dad is frantically applying the wet-vac to the carpet in what was once my room, to make sure that my dog has a clean patch of 30 year-old carpet to soil with his black dander, and my mom is being forced by him to buy cereals and fruit that I will never eat. I haven't packed my room up but I've sublet it to a nice boy who just graduated from Bard College who wants to be a bike messenger or a journalist or a freegan, he isn't sure which. I remember feeling like that, like one had options, so I chose him over the anti-union NYU grad (20 years old and going to law school? NO!) and the nice but unfortunately too-tall (for such a small space) graphic designer, because Bard boy's face was kind and open and he seemed not too disturbed by the fact that I have one thousand earthworms eating rotting apple cores in a box outside my door. I am dallying in my day job, which for most of the summer has consisted of surfing the Internet and occasionally reading linguistics reports about locative phrases, and dreaming of my ideal night job, which of course would be playing music with So So Shy.

I guess it's the end of the summer, Part I, so it's time to be melancholic and reflective in my blog, or just facetious about nostalgia. But really I feel fantastic, strong, healthy, and happy. The way that I've always visualized my happiness and health is that I feel like I can jump really high, lifting my legs up to my chest like a skateboarder doing an ollie, fast and flexible. I feel like that now, and it's wonderful to finally emerge from an incredibly taxing year and a half of alternating depression and exhaustion, from feeling desperately insecure about my friends, my housing situation, my career, my long-term financial solvency, my lover, my ability to provide enough exercise to my border collie mutt, my brain, my grades, etc. - to emerge from that feeling like I could jump up and over a tall cyclone fence if I needed to. Like leaping and border-crossing all at once! Unbeatable! I'm bobbing like a saltwater buoy!

I'm also glad to have ended the New York portion of the summer with a blowout weekend that left me so so tired but exhilarated. For this I have Stephanie, Raj, David, John, Will, Mustafa, Naomi, Will, Amy, Andre, Andrew, and especially my dear sweet cousin and new friend Jennifer to thank. I'm feeling a bit like what I imagine my subletter must feel like, filled up with a sense of possibility and a blind trust that the creativity of the people around me will keep me, us, everyone interesting and interested. What is this frothy goo I'm writing? I must still be on drugs.

so so shy

We had our first and last So So Shy concert on Friday. I'm a little at loss for words, but I will say that I'm very grateful for all of the good friends who came out to support us. Also, Will Dao is an amazing performer and I hope I'll get to play my crappy guitar solos* behind him in the future.



(*Crappy guitar solos = no rhythm + limited ability to play anything that doesn't sound like 1970s rock. A friend at the performance said that I was very "metal." That's all fine and good but our set was R&B and pop. After I played a particularly fuzzed-out guitar solo last week, David told me that we had just played "what white people hear when they listen to Beyonce.")

I was momentarily pissed off at the party when a buttload of mean-girl hipsters showed up, as friends of friends of friends who were never really friends at all, corralled themselves into a corner and refused to share beer or conversation, and then gave me the evil eye - this in my own house! I felt belittled and weak and crawled under the bed and hugged Boo, telling him that nobody understood us and we had no one but each other. But other than this half hour or so of intense self-pity and hatred, the party was fantastic fun and I saw people I haven't seen in years. And Friday night parties are the best, I think, because they leave you the entire weekend to recover from and reinitiate your benders, and to see the sideshow at Coney Island, bake magic cookies and stumble your way through a mesmerizing pride parade and two infinitely long and sensational and nauseating meals in the Village.

Part of yesterday's experience inspired me to write a poem:

Pride parade; mesh thongs.
Ladies and gentlemen, no!
For they hide nothing.

gaze in the miltry

Because my Property professor did not allow laptops in the classroom, during the second to last class I covered a blank sheet of white paper with the words "GAZE IN THE MILTRY" and then cut a square hole in the paper and made a trompe l'oeil window onto a drawing of a wide-open mouth. I have a pile of papers on my desk that beg for my attention but for some reason I can't do anything but think of the words GAZE IN THE MILTRY.

Also, a fun website I've discovered is www.instructables.com. I'm planning to make the Tobias Wong-esque sun jar tonight, because $60 is too much to pay at the MoMA design store for something that costs $8 to make. Next: LED throwies. http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=6

lord of the onion rings

Becca's uncle, unwittingly wearing a "Buttweiser" t-shirt, is refused entry at Disneyland unless he agrees to buy a pricey Disney t-shirt in the gift shop. It is a family establishment and one cannot wear a Buttweiser shirt even if one does not know what it means.

freudester

I just wasted fifteen minutes looking up people of yore on Friendster. The trend is that people who were ugly, skinny, and shunned then are now healthy post-dot-commers working on various IT-related things in the Silicon Valley who post pictures of themselves hiking and having fun with friends, whereas people who were attractive and well-dressed in high school are now overweight gum-smilers who work in various IT-related things in the Silicon Valley and also post pictures of themselves having fun with friends. The takeaway from today's lesson is that we all end up vermicompost, no matter where we come from.

inside one's toilet is

asbestosis dream

Slender golden fibers coming through the holes in my t-shirt and entering my brain and killing me slowly, even as I try to protect Boo and Stephanie from the cloud.

No more reinsurance work for me.

vermipost

The vermicomposting adventures continue. The Chrises did not attempt to wiggle to their seche deaths last night because I returned them from the dark of the apartment foyer to the perpetual fluorescent day of the hallway corridor. I don't care that they think the sun never sets, so long as they stop trying to crawl out onto the floor. I also roughed up the bedding a bit - ostensibly to introduce more air pockets into their asphyxi-bin, but most likely I only disoriented them and made them gay. I did a little bit of Google-hunting yesterday and read other people's worm testimonials, and an alarming many of them said things like, "Worms? Your first batch always die on you!" Other internet sages tell stories of dead worms smelling like fish. As much as I would prefer not to wake to a house covered in red wigglers, I would almost prefer that to waking to a tupperware bin with one pound of fish-smelling dead worms. Yesterday I peered into the bin for a good long minute trying to decide if the stiff, dark brown cappellinis I saw were worms or apple stems, and then I realized that I had not put apples into the bin.



So apparently I continue to feed my worms, blithely unaware that they're drying and dying. Or are they drowning and dying? Worms die when they are too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too choked, too aerated, too starved, and too fed. How am I supposed to know what to do?

In other news, I think I must be pregnant because of all of my recent hormone disequilibrium. Also, I realize I love a lot more people than this blog might make apparent; there is a picture of a unicorn on my desk with the word "plaintiff" written above it three times; I went to the Bronx Family Court recently and returned thinking only that Communist China offers comparable amenities for its municipal bureaucracies, and that it was such an awful, inhumane place to have the fate of your child determined; the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Long Island Care v. Coke that in essence domestic workers will be protected under federal minimum wage and overtime laws only upon the whim of the President and his DOL cronies; and I would like to take my parents on vacation somewhere.

gratuitous cute pictures of boo

my worms are trying to escape

Last week Stephanie bought a pound of red wiggler worms from the Union Square farmers' market and we drilled the word "CHRISES"

in Greek (for ventilation holes + to spite our neighbor, whose name is Chris) into a five gallon tupperware container, tore up newspapers, and dumped the worms with a fistful of brussels sprouts ends into their new home.

It's my first vermicompost effort, so I'm running up against a couple of problems that I don't know how to solve. Namely, my worms seem unhappy. I keep them in the hallway between my apartment building and aforementioned neighbor's, but there is a dim light on in the hallway at all times, so I worry that I am torturing my worms with perpetual day. The bedding seems to dry up so I mist the box with water once every two days. The worms should be able to eat a pound of food every day but they still haven't finished the meager handful of brussels sprouts ends from last week! And kale stems and carrot shavings are piling up all around them. Last night, in an effort to reduce their torture, I dragged them into the house at night so they could have full darkness - but when I checked on them this morning, a clump of a dozen or so worms had found their way to the top of the bin and were on the verge of pushing out! It was kind of disgusting to see a bunch of worms wriggling up and out the box and along my walls, so I hurriedly poked them all back in with a stick and slammed the lid shut on one of them, who was bruised but not killed, and then spent five minutes gingerly lifting up and accidentally dropping the butt end of a stray worm that had found its way onto the floor.

I am not the right person to be doing vermicompost because I am disgusted by worms. Cf. the picture to the left - that's what the ugly little fuckers looked like. They tumbled out all at once from the milk quart carton that the Lower East Side Ecology Center had packed them into. If you can believe it, it was even grosser than it looked, and I'm still not convinced that the ecological/curiosity-satisfying benefits of keeping the worms around outweighs my fear that I will wake up one day with little pink lines criss-crossing every surface of my apartment.

go back to canada

I'm at a point in my life now where I'm getting drunk and getting into arguments about immigration. I think if I were raised by less prudent parents I would be losing my shit and getting 40 days in a L.A. County jail for DUI, but as such my parents are loving and generous people and I am only feeling mildly ruined by my newly intemperate personality and accompanying willingness to tell closeted Republican Cubans that I'm planning to fuck them in the ass. I'm touchy and unforgiving - a long distance from the hippie boddhisattva that came out, hive-ridden and thinner, from my people of color meditation retreat two years ago where I learned to stop worrying and love my lot in life. The new me: black-suited Spiderman, just as ugly, just the same, except with a frond of emo hair and a new bad attitude.

Anyway, blah blah. What this means is that I got into an argument, four or five cups, not glasses, of wine into an 8-hour rooftop party, with a woman who works occasionally for a bakery at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market. She was a Canadian student getting a Ph.D. at the New School. I said, "What do you think of Bread Alone?" She said, "They're great, but I don't know where the monks come from. [The monks who bake the bread alone.] I bet they're all illegals." Looks between two angry Asian girls were exchanged. "I mean, is there like some monk exception to the law?" Angry Asian girls arched eyebrows. One left. One stupidly stayed to duke it out with halfway chagrined Canadian, who sputtered through a bevy of excuses without ever apologizing. She said things like, "You know I'm illegal too because I'm not supposed to be working!" She said things like, "Your friend seemed really mad at me, but I just wanted you to know that I know what's up, I understand it! I totally understand all the arguments!" One should not talk about white privilege with Canadians when drunk, because one spews platitudes about whiteness. In fact, one should never talk about white privilege, because it all seems platitudinous to white people, it seems like just another case of someone playing a whole fucking deck of race cards, it seems like crying wolf, and they never, never, never understand it. It seems like crazy non-white people are jealous and saying mean things about people based on race, and it makes me seem like a crazy non-white person. And I have to say, "Wait, wait! You're not listening! You don't get it!" and then they respond, "No, I'm cool, I get it, I'm illegal too!" and then you wring your hands and think that you're being treated like the protagonist in Gaslight. No one believes you, everyone thinks you're crazy, Cassie, and then you drink more wine and throw up collard greens between your green shoes by the AC ducts on the backside of the roof.

Which is to say, go back to Canada, you maple-sucking monarchist. Arrrgghhhh!!

me llamo no habla espanol

Things that are happening:

(1) As pop flies are flying backward and becoming foul balls, I almost pop a good friend in the face for suggesting that I have lost myself because I am working for a law firm. Why am I working for a law firm? Because it costs me a hell of a lot more money to start and secure a family than it does a white heterosexual girl, that's why! Because I have a different sense of security than my white friends, that's why! Because I am the only member of my family born in America, that's why!

(2) And related to (1), I've had this perhaps irrational hatred of white people recently, which I nurture every morning when I spend about half a billable hour talking to my officemate, a half-Japanese/half-Chinese nice guy who I berate for being a banana and for thinking the model minority myth is a good thing. Most recently, I got him to admit that he too hates white people, or, at the very least, that that big douchebag who recently exposed two continents to his drug-resistent form of TB and then excused himself by saying "I'm a well-educated, successful, intelligent man" who can decide better than public health experts when quarantine is necessary made the doucheheaded decision he made in part because he is a good-looking young white Georgian man, possibly descended from slaveowners, who has gotten away with shit his entire life.

(3) (2) has been reinforced by a recent exchange that I had with another article selection editor on my law journal, whose increasing petulance/intransigence over the course of an email exchange drove me to distraction for nearly two days and made me want to resign my post. I mean, if we in the most progressive journal in a progressive law school can't recognize that calling undocumented people "illegals" is highly offensive, if I need to convince my colleagues that English-only policies hurt not only Spanish speakers but all kinds of non-English speakers, if I need to explain why it's sexist and so pre-2nd wave feminist for someone to say offensively naive things about race but then claim that his responses are "intellectual debate" but mine are "upset" - what can I do? I said some mean things that I don't regret; I told him that he made me want to vomit. Why is that a mean, uncalled-for response? It was honest! His naivete (followed closely by his insistence that I educate him out of his naivete) made me want to hurl.

(3.5) And (2) makes me feel like a born-again angry Asian woman, and it makes me wonder why so many of my white activisty friends don't talk about racism, but anyway if they did it would be a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't because sometimes I feel that there's nothing more pathetic than roomfuls of white anti-racists who can't understand why their ranks remain entirely white. Anyway, this reawakening is the result of a long chain of events, the most immediate of which was hearing Harry Bubbins race by me on bike on the Manhattan bridge at 10pm as I walked across it sucking down a warm Yuengling with a friend. Harry saw me from about a hundred feet away and yelled "Heeyyyyyyyyy!!!!" as he rode by, his face lit with genuine pleasure. I recognized him only after he passed, and smiled and shouted "Heeyyy!!" in return because I've always felt that he was completely guileless and good as a result. But seeing him like that, on a bike in the night, made me think that because I was no longer dating a white person, I didn't have access to all these forms of activism that white people engage in - well, I shouldn't say activism so much as lifestyle choices, and for one small example take hitchhiking, which I never would have done unless I did it with a white person first. It makes me think differently about what it means that I am with a Chinese genderqueer from Georgia rather than a white woman from the northeast, not because we can make yellowbrown babies for the race revolution, but because there are so many things we can't do or that are much harder to do.

This is a babble now, but it'll become a manifesto when I finally get my head around why I'm so angry and then I'm going to sell it to you dear.

(4) I've seen lots of movies. I'm just going to list them:
- Crazy Love. I thought this movie wasn't worth the $10 but would have been worth a netflick. Pretty girl is blinded by crazy suitor, pretty girl then becomes not-so-pretty near-blind maturing lonely woman, ex-pretty girl then feels no choice but to marry her crazy suitor after he spends 12 years in prison. What do I see in this movie? Schlock, but then I see that the Filipina woman who also accuses the crazy suitor of sexual harassment is almost completely invisible. Back to (2)!
- Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. Like Kids, only with more sweat, personality, and death. I watched all the deleted scenes too. I'm glad the director decided not to do more of that meta writing-about-writing stuff. Is it possible treat a film depiction of a "reading" seriously? With Robert Downey Jr. in combat boots and beret?
- A Day Without a Mexican. After having the DVD out from NetFlix for nearly 11 months, Stephanie and I ended approximately 330 days without A Day Without a Mexican and watched it. It was so well-pitched - a silly satire with serious message that made me want to disembowel John Cornyn.
- Shopping for Fangs. I'm only halfway through this but I think it's already infinitely better than Better Luck Tomorrow.

I'm also incredibly simple of mind and after I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, I went home and thought about piracy for hours.

(5) Art. Richard Serra at Dia:Beacon made me forget everything else there. Except that everything else there seemed to be there just because the space was there, which I'm not complaining about, because it just means that I got to sprint from end to end of the deionized rooms without running into other people.

What else is there? Lethargy. This summer is rolling along nicely. It's taken me 38 minutes to write/be distracted from writing this, and that brings me 38 more minutes closer to the glorious close of the work day.

not billable

This time is not billable.